Korea’s biggest manufacturers support Config, TSMC robot data

Asia’s push into natural AI is fueled by the same manufacturing prowess that made the region a global industrial powerhouse. Across South Korea, Japan, China and Taiwan, manufacturing remains a central pillar of economic growth. Unlike more service- or software-heavy economies, these countries have long relied on large-scale manufacturing, export-based industries, and highly optimized supply chains. This structural foundation is now shaping how AI is adopted and where investment flows.

Which makes it especially important that Configurationa startup based in Seoul and San Jose that creates the data layer for robotic foundation models (RFMs), has secured backing from the venture arms of South Korea’s largest manufacturers.

Samsung Venture Investment led the $27 million oversubscribed seed round at a valuation of more than $200 million, bringing Config’s total raised to $35 million. Hyundai Motor’s venture arm ZER01NE Ventures, LG Tech Ventures, and SKT America, a VC unit of a South Korean telecom giant, also joined as strategic investors, along with angel investor Pieter Abbeel (co-founder of Covariant AI and UC Berkeley Bank, Berkeley Development Bank professors, financial backers, as well as financial backers. Kakao Ventures and Z Ventures.

Config was founded in January 2025 by CEO Minjoon Seo, a former researcher at Meta and chief scientist at Twelve Labs, along with three co-founders with backgrounds at Waymo, Google and Naver. Instead of building the robots themselves, the team is focusing on a simpler goal, providing data that the robots need to learn and function. They believe that better data will be the key to making robots more useful.

Training large language models is expensive, due to the computing power required to process them, but the raw material, vast amounts of text from all over the Internet, is easy to obtain. Teaching robots to move is a completely different challenge, Seo told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview. Every piece of training data needs to be collected physically, as you need the robot, facilities to run it and people to operate it. This makes robotic AI more expensive to develop than a software-only chatbot, according to Seo. As companies pursue more capable robots, the cost of collecting and tagging data can rise quickly.

Config wants to be the company that makes everyone else’s bot AI possible. The startup compares its role to TSMC, a Taiwanese chipmaker that builds for Apple, Nvidia and AMD without competing with any of them. Config aims to play a similar role in robotics by providing the data. The approach is gaining traction as major manufacturers increasingly seek to build their own proprietary AI robot rather than relying entirely on external vendors. This is the market that Config is betting on.

Config is already generating revenue, said Config COO and co-founder Jack Bang. The startup’s current customers include major manufacturers, systems integrators, and companies in the agriculture and defense sectors, Bang told TechCrunch. Peers in the space include Physical Intelligence, Generalist AI and Skild AI.

Config records people performing physical tasks in controlled studio environments and in the field. The startup operates in Seoul and Hanoi, where a workforce of nearly 300 handles data production. To date, it has collected over 100,000 hours of human movement data, more than 30 times the size of AgiBot World, the largest open source benchmark data set in about 3,000 hours.

Most robotics teams train AI models on human motion data and then adapt those models for a robot. Config takes a different approach, Seo said. The company focuses on transforming data before training begins to better match the way robots move and interact with the world. Seo compared the process to language translation. By training a model on one type of data and expecting it to work seamlessly in another environment, Seo said, he’s trying to teach Korean using only English-language material.

“The data needs to be transformed, not the model. This transformation technology is the key technical differentiator of Config,” said Seo.

The funding will be directed toward three priorities: scaling its data operation in Vietnam and Seoul to one million hours of collected data, growing its business platform to $10 million in ARR by the end of 2027, and launching a cloud-based Robot-as-a-Service product that allows companies to run Config’s core model without requiring embedded hardware.